It is well known that most golf courses include sand traps that are strategically placed along the fairways and at greenside as a form of obstacle for the golfer to overcome. On a modern 18-hole golf course there are normally about 3 to 5 sand traps per hole, or an average of about 70 to 90 traps per course. Traps vary in size from about 20 to 90 feet long, with a sand surface area ranging from about 400 to 5,000 square feet. Some of today's newer golf course designs have sand traps that extend the entire length of a hole, up to 250 yards in length. In 1989 the 24.7 million golfers in the United States played 474 million rounds of golf. With a realistic average of three sand shots per round, approximately 1.5 billion sand shots were played.
The time honored approach to golf course maintenance as it relates to sand traps has been that each trap is provided with several standard garden rakes that are placed at the edges of the trap. Each time a golfer plays a sand shot he is required by the etiquette of the game to locate one of the rakes and smooth his footprints and divot with the rake prior to leaving the trap area. As all golfers know, often a rake may not be found in proximity to his location in the trap, resulting in the frustration involved in locating a rake and an unwanted delay of play in a game already plagued by slow play. In addition to sand trap raking by individual golfers, at regular intervals the golf course maintenance crew will smooth the surface of all the traps using a motorized trap machine.
The presence of several rakes around each trap--as many as 6 to 10 rakes for larger traps--means that a typical golf course will have as many as 200 to 400 rakes scattered around its sand traps. These rakes are costly and must be replaced as they wear out, as they are lost and as they are damaged by improper use or occasional temper flare-ups. In addition, the rakes are inherently unsightly in a golf course environment. This aesthetic problem is exacerbated by the fact that golfers tend to randomly scatter rakes about the traps in various positions--sometimes in the surrounding grass, sometimes in the trap and at other times partly in the trap and partly on the grass.
During mechanized trap maintenance the golf course maintenance crew must first assure that the rakes have been removed from the trap prior to the sand smoothing operation. This of course would indicate that the best place for the rakes to be routinely placed is outside the trap. On the other hand, the grass immediately adjacent the traps must be mowed at regular intervals. Thus, for the convenience of the mowing crew, it would be best that the rakes always remain totally within the traps. Unfortunately, there is no best solution using the time honored approach.